Ortega kept on repeating: "Open the door, open the door," in such an amazing variety of intonations, imperative, whining, persuasive, insinuating, and even unexpectedly jocose, that I really stood there smiling to myself, yet with a gloomy and uneasy heart.Then he remarked, parenthetically as it were, "Oh, you know how to torment a man, you brown-skinned, lean, grinning, dishevelled imp, you.And mark," he expounded further, in a curiously doctoral tone - "you are in all your limbs hateful: your eyes are hateful and your mouth is hateful, and your hair is hateful, and your body is cold and vicious like a snake - and altogether you are perdition."This statement was astonishingly deliberate.He drew a moaning breath after it and uttered in a heart-rending tone, "You know, Rita, that I cannot live without you.I haven't lived.I am not living now.This isn't life.Come, Rita, you can't take a boy's soul away and then let him grow up and go about the world, poor devil, while you go amongst the rich from one pair of arms to another, showing all your best tricks.But I will forgive you if you only open the door," he ended in an inflated tone: "You remember how you swore time after time to be my wife.You are more fit to be Satan's wife but I don't mind.You shall be my wife!"A sound near the floor made me bend down hastily with a stern:
"Don't laugh," for in his grotesque, almost burlesque discourses there seemed to me to be truth, passion, and horror enough to move a mountain.
Suddenly suspicion seized him out there.With perfectly farcical unexpectedness he yelled shrilly: "Oh, you deceitful wretch! You won't escape me! I will have you...."And in a manner of speaking he vanished.Of course I couldn't see him but somehow that was the impression.I had hardly time to receive it when crash!...he was already at the other door.Isuppose he thought that his prey was escaping him.His swiftness was amazing, almost inconceivable, more like the effect of a trick or of a mechanism.The thump on the door was awful as if he had not been able to stop himself in time.The shock seemed enough to stun an elephant.It was really funny.And after the crash there was a moment of silence as if he were recovering himself.The next thing was a low grunt, and at once he picked up the thread of his fixed idea.
"You will have to be my wife.I have no shame.You swore you would be and so you will have to be." Stifled low sounds made me bend down again to the kneeling form, white in the flush of the dark red glow."For goodness' sake don't," I whispered down.She was struggling with an appalling fit of merriment, repeating to herself, "Yes, every day, for two months.Sixty times at least, sixty times at least." Her voice was rising high.She was struggling against laughter, but when I tried to put my hand over her lips I felt her face wet with tears.She turned it this way and that, eluding my hand with repressed low, little moans.I lost my caution and said, "Be quiet," so sharply as to startle myself (and her, too) into expectant stillness.
Ortega's voice in the hall asked distinctly: "Eh? What's this?"and then he kept still on his side listening, but he must have thought that his ears had deceived him.He was getting tired, too.
He was keeping quiet out there - resting.Presently he sighed deeply; then in a harsh melancholy tone he started again.
"My love, my soul, my life, do speak to me.What am I that you should take so much trouble to pretend that you aren't there? Do speak to me," he repeated tremulously, following this mechanical appeal with a string of extravagantly endearing names, some of them quite childish, which all of a sudden stopped dead; and then after a pause there came a distinct, unutterably weary: "What shall I do now?" as though he were speaking to himself.
I shuddered to hear rising from the floor, by my side, a vibrating, scornful: "Do! Why, slink off home looking over your shoulder as you used to years ago when I had done with you - all but the laughter.""Rita," I murmured, appalled.He must have been struck dumb for a moment.Then, goodness only knows why, in his dismay or rage he was moved to speak in French with a most ridiculous accent.
"So you have found your tongue at last - CATIN! You were that from the cradle.Don't you remember how..."Dona Rita sprang to her feet at my side with a loud cry, "No, George, no," which bewildered me completely.The suddenness, the loudness of it made the ensuing silence on both sides of the door perfectly awful.It seemed to me that if I didn't resist with all my might something in me would die on the instant.In the straight, falling folds of the night-dress she looked cold like a block of marble; while I, too, was turned into stone by the terrific clamour in the hall.
"Therese, Therese," yelled Ortega."She has got a man in there."He ran to the foot of the stairs and screamed again, "Therese, Therese! There is a man with her.A man! Come down, you miserable, starved peasant, come down and see."I don't know where Therese was but I am sure that this voice reached her, terrible, as if clamouring to heaven, and with a shrill over-note which made me certain that if she was in bed the only thing she would think of doing would be to put her head under the bed-clothes.With a final yell: "Come down and see," he flew back at the door of the room and started shaking it violently.
It was a double door, very tall, and there must have been a lot of things loose about its fittings, bolts, latches, and all those brass applications with broken screws, because it rattled, it clattered, it jingled; and produced also the sound as of thunder rolling in the big, empty hall.It was deafening, distressing, and vaguely alarming as if it could bring the house down.At the same time the futility of it had, it cannot be denied, a comic effect.
